A while back I wrote a critique of golang based on the introductory examples. The premise was simply I should be able to read it without reading the language spec and it didn’t pan out well. The result was more anecdotal than relevant. Now I committed to reading the docs and doing a real project in go.

I came into this after some investigation into clojure’s core.async. While like mostly everything in lisps core.async is written on top of the language in Go channels and coroutines are baked into the runtime which gives it blazing fast speed. It was so fast I thought it was broken.

The syntax is still confusing at parts and things like := vs = is just compounding the = vs == problem. The lack of named and default parameters is a bit vexing on a modern language but workable. The seemingly arbitrary new vs make and the hidden pointers make for some confusing surprises. I’d also expect some built in support for creating data pipelines but programs need to create all the necessary scaffolding for common patterns like map/filter/reduce. Third party libraries like GoFlow introduce flow based programing and fill the gap but being channels such a central feature the language should cover pipelining better.

This is getting data from a non trivial JSON structure in Go, minus proper error handling.

Go is strongly typed and the solution for dealing with JSON objects is going through Go’s void type, the generic interface interface{}, and then using an akward switch construct to cast to the correct data type. When the schema is well defined the JSON library allows you to unmarshal the data directly into structures but for unstructured data is this is the idiomatic way.

Using the “any type” trapdoor is sometimes necessary but when it’s a pattern it’s a sign something is wrong. It struck me when I read about copying and appending to arrays and discovered it’s a builtin. Why a builtin and not a method of slice ? Because the type system doesn’t allow it!

tl;dr;

The Go type system doesn’t allow append to be a method and doesn’t allow program code to have generic methods. The type system makes us, the programmers, second rate citizens in the language. We can’t extend the language in meaninful ways like writing a list implementation or higher level functions without going around the type system with interface{} and writing our own runtime type system.

The usual scenario in USA is getting your credit card swiped through some PC keyboard or Square reader attached to an iPad. Is that keyboard attached to a malware infected PC ? Is that iPad running a fraudster app ? Are those things card skimmers that will instantly transmit all your card information to cloners ? Every time a payer lets the card get swiped it’s a russian roulette. In fact, those transactions are nearly indistinct from fraudulent transactions except for the reputation of the merchant as they use exactly the same information a fraudster can steal at the point of sale.

EMV chip and pin uses dedicated tamper proof payment terminals which are independent from the store computers. That alone provides much better security for the card holder as a fraudster needs to physically access and modify the payment terminal to steal card data. While it’s totally possible to produce a fake payment terminal that looks legitimate it’s hard to install them at scale, as opposed to infecting windows point of sale networks with card stealing malware. One thing a tampered EMV payment terminal can do is capture your PIN which is bad if the fraudster also steals the card. Modern EMV cards and terminals prevent chip cloning and security conscious banks issue cards which chip data can only be used for EMV transactions so cloning shouldn’t be much of a concern. I’ve been very abrasive about the earlier EMV protocols but the truth is even those fundamentally flawed protocols provided much better security than band swipe.

For the merchants chip and pin releases them from the considerable burden and liability of processing credit card numbers. It also allows them to tap into the world market of EMV payment terminals and there’s the fact merchants will be liable for all fraud on non EMV transactions.
So why all the fud and resistance to the switch ? One reason is an unsecure swipe gadget is under 5 USD while a secure EMV terminal costs from 50 USD to to 500 USD depending on the features and complexity. Another could be that EMV chip payments, like Apple Pay, don’t give the store’s system any information about the payer as opposed to swipe which gives the store the payers name and credit card number.

Lately San Francisco has been in the news a lot for mostly the wrong reasons. Aparently tech companies continue to flock to sanfran despite being well past the cost breaking point. Out of control homeless population and absurd house prices go hand, in hand with people living month to month on six figure salaries and finding themselves on the streets immediately after the slightest hardship.

I live in Lisbon, a fairly cheap city in Europe, and all this sounds pretty crazy. As Make’s Sabrina Merlo noted on her visit to our Maker Faire Lisbon and San Francisco look like long lost twin cities, with the same by the sea feel, the same bridge and the same street cars. It’s October, sunny outside and I’m in a short sleeve polo shirt. Just had a good meal for 8 euros but sometimes go crazy and splurge 20 euros for tasty sushi. Housing is affordable and while we keep complaining about our public transport it covers all the wider metro area and it’s stellar by USA standards. A large part of the population has at least rudimentary English communication skills, certainly due to the fact tv is subtitled not dubbed, and we invented the multicultural metropolis.

While Lisbon remains mostly untapped Portuguese talent is well known as quite a few of the skilled engineers our technical universities graduate every year end up in London, Dublin or Berlin. Some smaller and more agile tech companies are already taking advantage of the Portuguese amenities but the practice hasn’t caught on yet. Maybe with the move of Web Summit to Lisbon that will change and more tech companies will open offices in Lisbon.

My first job was at an international carrier making the internet. Only a small bit of it but still, it was a great fun time. Line failures are common in this line of work. Someone opens up a cabinet a gives the wrong patch a firm tug or closes a door and something that wasn’t meant to bend ends up in a sharp turn. Sometimes a whole cable would fail, dug up by some nameless builder. Sometimes an undersea cable carrying millions of megabits per second of voice and internet between two continents would break. This is fortunately rare as there’s not much construction work under the sea. Most of time it’s a ship going by a coast dragging its anchor through the sea floor, sometimes a storm is so severe a cable gets tossed and turned until it breaks. When this happens there’s only one thing to do, call The Boat and wait two weeks or a month for it arrive, hoist up the ends and mend the cable.

But every once in a while something weird would happen. A cable would die and some hours later it would just come back online. When that happened the older more experienced cable maintenance guys would just shrug it off and say “it’s just the US army splicing in”. It was said half jokingly, half in awe. Splicing into an optical fiber is hard enough in dry land, cutting in and fusioning the light splitter is delicate work and doing it 100m under sea is nothing short of amazing. It involves cutting the cable in 2 and fusioning each individual fiber on both ends to the spliter piece that separates a bit of the light onto a second spy cable. You have to keep it dry throuhout the process and seal everything back up in the end. But the common wisdom was the americans could tap into undersea cables 15 years ago.

Or maybe it was only old linesmen tales and the americans never tapped anything.

The space used up by Other in my iPhone has been creeping up for while. Other is iTunes speak for “i don’t know what this is”. It’s basically what’s left of the used up space after all media and apps are accounted for. A bit of Other is natural, there’s always system temporary files lying around, config files, upgrade images and other random stuff. But when it get to 4G things have gotten out of hand.

At this point a regular user gives up and does a full restore from a backup. Not being a regular user I went with getting to the bottom of this so I evasioned my iPhone.

A bit of poking around the filesystem and sure enough something looked strange.

2.6G ./Podcasts

I’m pretty sure I don’t have 2.6G worth of podcasts and iOS thinks so too.

So where’s the other 2G ? Well, I found a bit over 500M in staged iOS updates and couldn’t be bothered to look further. The moral of the story is Podcasts.app is an unmitigated disaster. It’s probably the worse app Apple ever released. The first versions just downloaded stuff over and over using up cellular data. Then the control appeared but despite being set to never use 3G it would happily stream over cellular. And this space leakage is just as if Apple is forcing people to buy more expensive phones.

There’s a disturbing number of func right in the first line. Obviously Go is strongly typed and I’m immediately sitting in Introduction to C trying to figure out to prototype a function that returns a list of functions that return void * and take two functions as arguments each taking two pointers to int as arguments having the function an argument that’s an array for pointers to void. This isn’t a good feeling. On the plus side Go’s syntax seems more natural reading left to right as “a function fib that takes no arguments and returns a function that returns an int”.
Then on the next line we have something I always hated with a passion, :=. I understand the point of making = and == very distinct but if you want that change == not =. := is just non natural except for a very strict group of computer scientists.

Then we have a return statement with a repetition from the fib() proto. Some people will say this is just good programing making sure you got the right thing, me I was saying just a couple of days ago every time you have to write exactly the same thing in two places you’re doing something very wrong. Of course you’re going to return func() int, you’ve said it 2 lines ago.
And then there’s something I put right up there with i += i++ + ++i. What’s a,b = b,a+b supposed to mean ? Do you do a = b and then b = a+b ? Is it a list assignment of (b,a+b) to (a,b) ? I can’t tell. I’m sure somehow Go has got ()less lists and it’s a list assignment but it confuses the hell out of. Also, = ? There’s two assignment operators ? One for initialization and another for changing values ? Really ? At this point we got :=, = and ==.

One point for Go, this example shows closure. On the other hand everything is strongly typed except variables which are inferred. f := fib() means, f is a variable of type whatever fib() returns so if fib’s interface ever changes some interesting stuff will happen and the interpreter will never be the wiser. You get all the hassle of typing and none of the benefits.

Let’s try to digest this in the context of Number is a pointer to itself. You create a new Number called e. First, new(Number) makes me sick after all these years of trying to kill new in JS. Then you say *e = x which I have no idea what’s supposed to do. Looks like pointer manipulation and you’re throwing away the new(Number) and pointing e to x. Or you could be deferring x somehow and making the value of e be the same as x.

func sub1(x *Number) *Number {
return *x
}

No clue what this is supposed to do. You’re taking an argument and returning.

Well, looks like it is. You’re splicing stuff off x and counting how many times you can do it before you run out of elements. This also tells me arguments are passed by value so this Number arrays are being copied left and right.

After all the weirdness above main is pretty simple. As far as I can tell Number is a list of Number objects and * can either push or pop depending on being a lvalue or a rvalue.
Hopefully the next one is better.

import (
"fmt"
"math"
)

So this should be a list of strings. Which means a,b = c,d isn’t list assignment. Hum.

make. Is it like new ? But different ? (turns out new allocates and returns a pointer like in C++ but make allocates some specific types and doesn’t return a pointer - bad) chan seems to be a qualifier so ch is a chan of floats. Then you can run a loop going a function on ch. Maybe this is the parallelization feature I’ve heard about. This is probably the first neat thing on the language so far so lets see where this goes. I’m sure term is defined to take a float64 but you need to type cast the int to keep the interpreter happy and you do it in a awkward way too, is float64() a function ? A keyword ? Syntax for cast ? Is it even important ?

A couple of lines down we find <-ch which looks like an iterator or generator. The syntax is awkward versus <= but the principle seems sound, you fill ch with values by going term on it and then pull them out as needed. The syntax does allows lazy evaluation but go func(ch) is kinda strange.

So <- is 2 operands, left is pop and right is push apparently, makes some sense. Not sure I like it though. Hopefully this is a back pressure mechanism and you evaluate term to fill ch when it reaches a low watermark. The syntax seems hard to follow and what if a single generator function fill more than one channel ? Confusing.

First time I read this main it felt like i was reading Conway’s Quantum Superpositional Perl. Turns out this is just a bad intro example that does something really fancy. ch is your 2.. channel and you can take a prime number from it right of the bat cause we know 2 is prime. Then you create a new channel that filters on this prime make ch this channel. So by now ch emits 2,3,5,7,9,.. . Then you extract the 3 and add a new filter to the channel filters using 3 so now you have 2,3,5,7,11,.. . And so on. Despite the awkward syntax this is actually very cool.

So what’s wrong with Go anyway ?

The syntax is very very awkward. It makes it hard to read both at the statement level and at the package level. It has a lot of brilliant stuff like streams and concurrency but the syntax is like if a C programmer read about Perl, wanted to make a language as awesome as Perl but looking like Python and not totally alien to Java programmers. As a result we get some stuff that’s proven a mistake in Javascript and madness like
type T struct {
a int
}
func (tv T) Mv(a int) int { return 0 } // value receiver
func (tp *T) Mp(f float32) float32 { return 1 } // pointer receiver
var t T

t.Mv(7)
T.Mv(t, 7)
f := T.Mv; f(t,7)

which is a declaration of an object with 2 methods crammed into C. The 3 function/method calls are equivalent.

Looking at the examples and some of the documentation it seems Go must undergo the same process JS is/should be undergoing, remove a bunch of optional syntax and confusing shorthands that allow easily misreadable idioms. When that happens Go will kick ass!

Where it comes to phone storage there’s basically 2 camps, all onboard and mostly off board via memory cards. Mostly the all onboard camp is composed by the iPhone while the mostly offboard camp is populated by the Androids. People like slamming the iPhone for not being expandable and forcing you to go all in at purchase time while Androids (and symbians before that) let you get more storage space when you needed it. Surely the all onboard approach is a planed obsolescence tool, it helps you decided when to get a new iPhone. But it’s also a ver y sound engineering decision.

Android users are familiar to this scenario: you pop a shiny new 16G card on your phone and it still tells you there’s no more space for apps. How can that be ? There’s 10G free right there. However, the OS can’t trust it. It’s formatted using a subpar filesystem and the user might pop it out at any time. It’s no place to store apps that might even be running and suddenly disappear. So apps are limited to a bit of the small onboard storage that’s reliable. On the other hand the iPhone users can use all of the limited onboard storage for apps cause it’s all first class. So what you win in flexibility you lose in flexibility. And then there’s windows phone were you get to use a crappy slow card for apps that you can’t actually remove without breaking the phone.

(written shortly after hacking around with apps2sd on ICS to get more app storage)

My venerable Asus WL-500W finally kicked the digital bucket and forced me to upgrade. It was running dd-wrt so I went around and looked for something dd-wrt capable. I ended up finding the Asus RT-N66U which is dual 2.5/5GHz, openly dd-wrt friendly and carbon black.

Why would you want a 802.11N 5GHz band router you ask ? Well, first off 2.4GHz is saturated with noise if you live in a building. In my building channel 6 is useless (I mean, you can even associate) and everything else is overused. I need to go to channel 13/14 to make it actually work. The other reason is on 2.4GHz despite having N enabled you’ll probably also have B/G compatibility for older or cheaper devices so once that one G client connects your wireless speed will be pulled down. On the 5GHz you’ll only have N clients so you’ll be going full tilt. And what’s full tilt ? On 5GHz my macbookpro did around 115Mbps download versus about 80Mbps on 2.4GHz channel 13 and no G clients. The gigabit ethernet switch did OK, I measured about 800Mbps server to server. This are payload speeds, so actual wire speeds will be 8 to 10% higher.

Geting to this speeds means the CPU can’t be a slouch, the Asus RT-N66U has a 300MHz Broadcom MIPS chip and 265M RAM.

It also has a roomy 32M flash which means plenty of space for fat firmwares. Also 64k of it can be used for nvram (which is used to save the configs) but more on that later. There’s 2 USB2.0 ports as usual and I haven’t craked warranty on mine yet but this pictures show a 3.3V serial header (J1), what looks like a JTAG header without the pins (J2) and a microSD slot people say is wired and works. For some reason ASUS left it locked inside the case and useless to mostly everybody. It was nice of them to put the serial header in there, I spent most of an evening soldering one into the 500W.

I booted the stock firmware long enough to confirm stuff worked. There’s a nice novelty on the N66U, the recovery mode (which is access by powering on with the reset button pressed until power starts blinking slowly) now has a small web server on http://192.168.1.1/ where you can upload a firmware and clear nvram. Not only you don’t have to mess around with tftp to load firmware but also clearing settings doesn’t involve loading a specific mini build anymore. That particular bit saved my bacon once already while loading dd-wrt.

You’ll need a recent build of dd-wrt, their wiki says 18946 or 19342, I’m on 19342 mega and it’s working fine apart from not supporting 64k nvram hack yet. Despite the router having it, the bootstrap loader (CFE) doesn’t seem to know about it so the firmware must do a hack the use all the space. I’m not exactly sure how the hack (which is in stock firmware) works and what would happen when you clear nvram from recovery mode, most likely only half would get erased. There’s a thread about this here if you want to read more about it.
Flashing dd-wrt is straight forward, just follow the instructions and use the recovery mode mini http server.

The news of Steve’s death were expected but still came as a shock for everybody. Like if the guy was holding on for one last product launch.

Lots of people wrote extensive, thoughtful and well written eulogies. I will just remark what most impressed me about Steve Jobs, he was a master of simplicity. Simplicity is hard, everyone who tries to write software knows this. For me simplicity is really hard, I’m a crufter so seeing someone churn out products by removing, not adding, features is like magic.

Steve came back from NeXT to Apple, brought UNIX and built an aesthetic and simple UI around it. Then he did the same to the mp3 player and to the smart phone. My first analysis of the iPhone was focused on what it lacked, not what it had. It sounded pretty foolish as soon as iPhones started filtering into people’s hands and it became obvious it wasn’t missing anything. Everything that couldn’t be made perfect was removed. Deliberately. That kind of focus and courage is unique.